The Elden Ring Tiger Electronics LCD game is pretty fun.

Here are the apps I used that I’m not seeing.

• FoodNoms for calorie counting
• Waking Up for guided meditation
• Finch for gamified general mental health
• Future for asynchronous virtual training
• Tripsy for travel tracking
• Organic Maps for offline mapping
• Transit for navigating most US cities via public transit
• Fastmail for personal email (Apple Mail for work email)
• 1Password for password management
• Elaho for browsing Gemini
• Tidal for music
• Vellum for cool backgrounds
• SwiftScan for scanning documents
• iPlum for a cheap business phone number
• Kagi Search to set the Kagi search engine as the default in Safari
• Parcel for package tracking
• Mona for Mastodon

And I’ll second some others.

• Overcast
• Bookplayer
• Reeder
• AnyList
• Sleep Cycle
• Signal
• Obsidian
• Vinegar
• Noir

Yeah, definitely depends on who I’m recommending to. If it’s someone who’s pretty familiar with games, I think it would be Elden Ring. Love the sense of exploration and discovery in that game.

I switched fairly recently. I was on Ting before, and they appear to be quietly sunsetting that service after Dish Network bought them a few years back. Hoping the same doesn’t happen to Mint. It’s been great so far. Incredible value!

Yeah, come to think of it, I think this is a larger issue I have in life: I always have to be working toward a goal or else I feel guilty. I can see your point of view too though. If there’s no beginning and end, there’s no minimum amount of time you need to play. The goal is just to enjoy.

My perspective is basically the inverse: if there’s no beginning and end, there’s no maximum amount of time I need to play. 😅

I don’t feel this way about open-world games because they do usually have an end and you can skip a lot of the open-world filler content. I get this anxiety about sandbox games. I hate it because I really enjoy games like Cities Skylines and I’d love to get into Dwarf Fortress, but I can’t play them anymore because I could spend 1,000 hours in one of them and never finish. That open-endedness keeps me from playing.

Greater transparency under capitalism is always a good thing. I have to admit, one thing Trump did that I liked was to force hospitals to publish their prices. I can’t think of a good reason people buying a thing shouldn’t know how much it costs beforehand.

I would like to make a distinction between a “content creator” in the literal sense — just a person who creates content — and a “content creator” as the phrase is commonly used today — a person who makes a living by selling content or by giving away content to market something else.

I, for one, would be very interested in seeing more people on the fediverse creating content, but I’m not super interested in the fediverse becoming a marketing channel for professional content creators.

Of course, it’s an open platform, so pro content creators are more than welcome to join. I’m just not super excited about approaching them and saying, “please come hock your wares to us on the fediverse!”

Illucia: the town of Final Fantasy. This was a Final Fantasy fan site, but themed as a town from a Final Fantasy. This isn’t a town ripped out of a particular game though. Illucia was an entirely original town with original art created by fan Tatsushi Nakao.

Before the release of FF7, it was themed after a town from the 16-bit era of Final Fantasy. To navigate the town, the user was presented with a clickable server-side image map, where clicking on different buildings in the town would take the user to a page on the site that was thematically appropriate to the building.

Quick aside: a history lesson on image maps. Image maps were a technique that allowed for a single image to be linked to multiple different places based on where the user clicked it. In the later years of image maps, the web site developer (“webmaster” to use the period-appropriate nomenclature 😜) could define the different clickable areas in HTML and the browser would handle requesting the correct URL based on where the user clicked. This is a client-side image map. Before browsers had this capability though, browsers would instead send the clicked coordinates to a server-side script — often written in Perl, I think — which would translate the coordinates and send back the corresponding page.

Anyway, after the release of FF7, Illucia was reworked in that style. I believe in this iteration, the user would interact with it by using the arrow keys to walk an actual character avatar around the town and enter various buildings rather than clicking on a (relatively) simple image map.

Just like the FF series did, the site sorta lost its luster for me at that point. Final Fantasy had gone from an ensemble cast of quirky but warm characters and brightly colored pixel art to a blue and gray mess of blurry, pre-rendered environments and low-poly brooding characters that looked bad at the time and aged even worse. I pretty much stopped visiting, but I still fondly remember those old pixel art days of Illucia.

Sadly, I haven’t been able to find any trace of it online anymore aside from one brief mention in another online article. If anyone knows of anything, please send it my way!

Sliced turkey, pear, and feta 🤌